A vast monument to the obscure and glorious, to the dead and awakened...A soundtrack for the 23rd dimension... a post-genre codex of grave import.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Ramases & Selket

The "R" of The A-to-Zed of Erol Alkan: Ramases & Selket, apparently "a guy who fixed boilers in Blackburn." Who suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy... or maybe came up with a squirrelly promotional gimmick. I mean, had a Philip K. Dickensian vision of iconic reincarnation. He was a Pharaoh reborn!

Witness... the evolution, of Ramases!!

"Mind's Eye" - B-side, by Ramases & Selket (1968)

This is the song on Erol Alkan's BBC list. Very authentic, evocative of ancient Egypt, to wake the Pharoahs. Selket was the missus.

"Crazy One" - A-side, by Ramases & Selket (1968)

The cover of this single, along with the "Crazy" title, and the actual song itself, lines up pretty well. Ahhh, the sixties.

"Screw You" - A-side, as Ram and Sel (1970)

This is so totally bent! I'm really not grokking the Apache beat, and the single-entendre, and... everything.

With the expanded palette of an entire LP, Ramases seems to have gotten serious. Like, real serious. Mystical prophecies of the brotherhood of man type stuff. I'm not expert enough to pass judgment between the outrageous novelties and the mind-expanding conceptual-psych-folk-pop... Only you can decide.

"Golden Landing / Long Long Time" from Glass Top Coffins (1975)

With the twin assists of the Royal Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestras, the 2nd record seems like the come-down of a broken savant. "Long Long Time" shows the distinct thumbprint of The Beatles, in multiple ways.

As a reminder, the "A to Zed" show with Erol is well worth getting, here at Archive.org. Seriously good.